A community resource and support group designed as a 6 week* session to create a safe space for that delicate time after pregnancy and birth. A place you can come while your baby cries the whole time. Yes, please come. A place you can come not worrying about a shower, or we can be your excuse for a shower!

The variety of emotional ranges and physical changes after giving birth can feel isolating – but there’s a woman out there thinking those same thoughts that you are! We want you to get a chance to meet her. Come meet the moms you can create friendships with, not just because you’ve had babies, but because there’s a true spark of friendship and understanding.

Each week we will seek to address one of the topics listed below.

Birth Processing

Sleep

PPD vs baby blues, and the range between

Feelings of Isolation

Self care

Self image and Body Image

Breast and bottle feeding, including pumping

Childcare Issues and Considerations

To Work or Not to Work? Work from home?

Relationship Balance, including Sex

Navigating Friendships – old friends, childless friends, new friends, those with different parenting philosophies

And any other topics that you would like to be addressed

Topics will be chosen by the class. General round table group chat.

Peer support facilitated by non-judgmental, working mommas, who happen to be peri-birth professionals, who have been where you are and will cry, laugh, and listen right alongside you. And maybe take turns holding some babies while we’re at it.

This group is limited to 12 women to facilitate real relationship building. Walk-ins cannot attend as we are creating a safe space for sharing. You are certainly welcome to attend more than one session.

*WEEKEND GROUPS COMING SOOON IN 2019!!*

(We’re so excited, can’t you tell?!)

Weekend groups will be 4 weeks vs the Friday 6 week group, and are therefore $80 to register as a new member. As always, any an all returning members come for $60. Using the same registration form below you can register and choose to pay via Paypal, or at the first session.

First, let’s address why Black Breastfeeding Week is important. Then, I’ll point out events that are happening in the Cincinnati and surrounding areas, so that you can take part in supporting this amazing cause.

Black Breastfeeding Week.org has their own list of what makes it important to them. This deserves to be read and listened to; as the topic raised by #4 would have been overlooked by a middle-class white woman such as myself.

That statement above only highlights its importance.

As a mother, lactation expert, childbirth educator, and mother’s support facilitator, I also have research-based reasons why this is important to us as a community of mothers and professionals:

Disparity of care. The majority of Lactation professionals in the United States are white. Yes, I know this includes myself. This unfortunately speaks to the realities of racial privilege as means and access to available training. This disparity needs to be recognized and addressed within training organizations, as well as in how we recruit and interact with communities outside of our own personal culture.

Lack of people of color in professional roles. A lack of women of color in professional roles creates an even greater divide because of relatability. Women have better outcomes with professionals they can identify with, yet this lack of representation in advocacy and role models only furthers the goal of successful breastfeeding within African American communities.

Access to care. Many people of color aren’t aware of the resources available to them in the general populace.

Economic divisions. In many, too many, places in the US, there are economic boundaries to getting the service, care, and educational materials needed. This is seen in surprising places, such as hospitals. (See the next bullet point.)

Institutional support. Black women report a lack of support to breastfeed by medical institutions that serve their communities, even from nurses, pediatricians, and lactation professionals in hospital settings.

Health differences. The sad fact is that access to prenatal care and health care in general for African American women in the United States is dismal, and it is a problem that spirals. Birth outcomes have a major impact on breastfeeding outcomes, yet African Americans have greater rates of Gestational Diabetes and hypertension, which then translates to childhood obesity rates, SUIDS & SIDS, and asthma. Many cite the reasons behind these health issues as going back to economics: access to food, housing issues, and preventative medical care.

Infant mortality. This is the worse statistic of all, and it is clear: African American infants die at twice the rate of their white counterparts, with higher rates of preterm birth, higher NICU stays, and lower birth weights.

At this point I want to apologize to Black Breastfeeding Week organizers, as this is not the Joyous Post idealized in this year’s awesome #BlackBFJoy theme. I’ll make it up to you tomorrow with a simply gorgeous breastfeeding photo story.

Today’s post was instead to explain, to educate, and to confirm the necessity of this week’s outreach. I sincerely hope you readers will pass along this knowledge to your own communities.

The idea is that when confronted with all of these factors, you can start to see a bigger picture. You can start to see how one person’s role can sadly cause a chain reaction of negative damage, yet also how one point of outreach could truly help a family, and therefore a child, a baby.

It has long been theorized that with enough Vitamin D supplementation for a breastfeeding mother, the amount needed for babies would pass through the mother’s milk.

Now this theory is confirmed, via a double-blind randomized controlled trial, which ran from 2006 to 2014, and was published in 2015.

Considering this information is incredibly new to the pediatric world, you may not hear about this from your pediatrician justyet, because it hasn’t changed the AAP recommendation.

Please note that this is an AAP (American Academy of Pediatrics) recommendation, not a WHO one, so outside of the United States this information benefits your health and baby in a whole new way.

Here’s the takeaway:

If you are a breastfeeding mom, whether directly or Exclusively Pumping (EP), there is an option to give your baby the daily dose of Vitamin D, via your body!

Instead of supplementing your baby with Vitamin D everyday, moms can supplement themselves with a minimum of 6400 IU/day, and the baby’s levels will be the same as a mom who does not take a Vitamin D supplement and gives their baby the recommended AAP dose of 400 IU/day.

Of course, if you don’t trust yourself to remember to take a daily supplement, the recommendation is to still supplement your baby directly.

Want more information?

Many questions and answers can be found on the KellyMom.com reporting of this, in an interview conducted with the researcher himself, Dr. Bruce Hollis.

Psychologically speaking you weren’t ready to learn about baby care until now! Until 36/37 weeks gestation, most first time parents are consumed with what is going on in their body and life changes; being immersed in all of that is completely normal. Then there is a shift, where suddenly you do care more about the postpartum part, the feeding and diapering. The worry about sleep. The nesting is over and the wait for the “after baby” part sets in.

Oh My Goodness. I’ve never even changed a diaper.

(It’s ok! Again, this is completely normal. You’ll be an expert after 3.)

Seek out a Newborn Care Class! Although the majority of first time parents get most of their information from Dr.Google, friends, and family members, did you know that getting information together helps facilitate the stages of parenting that occur after birth?

In a class you can ask questions that are individually suited to your family’s needs. You can practice changing that diaper, learn about baby wearing and other soothing techniques, feeding expectations, and when to call a doctor or a lactation specialist.

More than that, in Modern Breastfeeding + Education’s Newborn Baby Care Class we help you learn about each other. Facilitating communication, partner and baby bonding, protecting the core relationship as parents, and the “new normal” that is bringing in a roommate who needs 24/7 care.

And learn about sleep. Sleep is real life guys.

I hope you’ll join us, and if you aren’t local to the Cincinnati, Dayton, or Northern Kentucky areas, here’s a helpful list of questions to use when finding any perinatal class locally, that is right for you!

Welcome to the new Modern Breastfeeding + Education! This new site is a way to get easy access to prenatal education classes, in person individualized lactation support, and community resources such as our All Moms postpartum group series.

But first, it’s Giveaway Week to celebrate the launch of the site!

Normal online rules apply:
* Must subscribe to the Modern Breastfeeding + Education Newsletter
* Have to like and follow on Facebook AND Instagram. (Pinterest, Twitter, and Linked-In are optional, but have a ball.)
* Then, subsequently comment and/or share me on one of the above platforms for **that day’s** prize. You don’t have to comment or share on both, just one, Facebook or Instagram.
* Giveaway promotion starts **Monday, August 1st**, with prizes announced each day on Facebook AND Instagram, along with the winner from the previous day. I don’t want to clog up feeds too much.

ETA (Edited to Add): I’ve received questions on how I’m choosing winners and whether or not someone who has previously won can win again. The answer is YES. I’m pretty anal and love excel spreadsheets, so I’m doing this old school. Names are entered into a list once you share or comment on the post. Each day’s list starts anew. Then, after I double check that you’re following me on both facebook and Instagram, as well as subscribing to the newsletter, I ask my older son to pick a number between 1-however long the list is. I know, it makes me sound like a luddite, which I secretly am. I hope that helps, sounds truly anonymous and fair to all!

DAY ONE: Monday, August 1st

DAY TWO: Tuesday, August 2nd

DAY THREE: Wednesday, August 3rd

DAY FOUR: Thursday, August 4th

DAY FIVE: Friday, August 5th

DAY SIX: Saturday, August 6th

DAY SEVEN: Sunday, August 7th

Day Seven IS announced! Because it’s fun and big and for parents AND little ones.

As a now supposed academic this should appall me, reducing a 100 page tome that represents a year of my life into a blog post. But it doesn’t. As proof, I just started a sentence with a conjunction, so there!

If grad school taught me anything, aside from research methodologies, medical statistics intrepretation, ethics in healthcare models … I digress. Let’s try that again. If grad school taught me anything, it’s that there’s a shocking amount of information garnered from published studies that everyday people don’t know about. This upset me a great deal.

Based on that, I composed a thesis proposal for “dissemination of academic information to expectant women”, that my thesis mentor, god-bless-her, Dr. Anna Blair, kindly laughed at and told me sounded like a PhD proposal. And so it was with my next three proposals. Sometimes I bite off more than I can chew, like having my own thriving business, a 3.5 year old, a 6 month old, and applying for grad school … huh, go figure.

Then she said words I literally wrote down they were so awesome: “Why are you in this program?”

She was right. I had abandoned almost 500 hours of internship hours in a different Pathway before switching to an academic Pathway for my IBCLC. (This is nerdy lactation speak – there are 3 Pathways to apply to sit for the board exam. Doula support and teaching hours don’t count. You have to follow around a mentor for documented hours, and I was lucky enough to have 4 mentors in NYC.) I switched because I wanted to know what would really help women breastfeed. That, and I was already reading so much research on a weekly basis, I knew I could do more with it.

Accordingly, she encouraged me to work backwards.

Research stats show us that attending a Prenatal Breastfeeding Class has less impact* than prior exposure to breastfeeding, partners being supportive, and maternal-influence.

*Gives you real faith to want to take a breastfeeding class now, doesn’t it?! Sign up now!

Getting back to it – to influence breastfeeding outcomes, I needed to understand those who wanted to breastfeed, as well as those who did not. After all, the women who called me for individual support or hired me for birth services because of my CLC, really wanted to breastfeed, struggles or not.

Thus my topic was born!

“Choices in infant feeding: Why women choose to breastfeed or not to breastfeed, and when. A crystallization method approach to existing research.”

Sounds super fancy, right? It’s basically a large scale literature review. More on that in Part II, I’ve babbled on long enough for a blog post.

This story is a long time coming, because at the time I was a newly trained doula. I was only in your apartment two minutes for an interview, your toddler enjoying her nap, when you looked at me with worry, and said “I don’t want to try to breastfeed this baby. Is that OK?”

I’m sure the pause that followed was perceived as me struggling to answer, but in truth it was my mind reeling (selfishly, with unknowing) on my own journey, my own struggle of breastfeeding, the things that inspired me to do the work I was doing now, here. You didn’t know my goal was to one day become an IBCLC, that breastfeeding defined my birth journey. Nor did I want to give you a blanket statement. So I leaned towards you, met your eyes intently, and said what was in my heart, “Of course. It’s your decision.”

But the look on your face was unsettled . . .

So, perhaps too quickly, my mind racing ahead of my better judgement, I asked “Have people told you that’s not OK?” It came out incredulous; it was probably too much. And you cried. You told me of the multitude of providers and doulas you had interviewed, who all immediately tried to encourage you otherwise. You knew they meant well, but because of your own awful experience with your first child it was heartbreaking for you.

I never asked you why you didn’t want to, it honestly didn’t matter. In those moments, we switched from interviewer and birth professional to two moms, two women, devastated at a loss so simple – that of people respecting your decisions about your own body.

After hiring me, you went on to have such an incredible experience, and honestly, I can’t remember when it was that you told me of your reasons: a botched breast reduction as a young women in Europe, a complete restructuring of the breast, giving birth in another country years later where they said breastfeeding would be no problem, watching your baby lose weight for weeks as you pumped, and fed, and struggled, bouts of masitis as the milk was unable to leave your breast. It sounded horrific. It sounded like a physical barrier to breastfeeding.

But those reasons aren’t what mattered. They are irrelevant against a backdrop of personal experience, a loss of enjoying those weeks with your first newborn, the fear of not feeding the baby you loved, and of course, the judgement you already knew you’d face with this pregnancy.

To self: Exhale.

I see your face sometimes, in my work now.

It inspires me to remember that what you were truly asking for was real support – the kind that doesn’t ask why’s, or look for justifications. The kind of support that says – “OK. You’ve made a decision for you, OK.”

I see it when a lactation client calls and says she just can’t anymore, or when writing a care plan for a client, I’m reminded to make it realistic. I see when women feel guiltly for a choice they know is better for their family, but is one they already know they’ll be judged for.

So I just wanted to write you, and tell you thank you.

Thank you for such a wonderful lesson. Thank you for sharing your birth with me. Thank you for the years of photographs of your girls, who also remind me that one day they’ll need support too. Real support, the kind that doesn’t ask why’s or look for justifications.

The kind of support that says – “OK. You’ve made a decision for you, OK.”